When the Moon Didn't Fall
by rynling
Summary: All the clocks in Clock Town have stopped working, and letters have stopped arriving from the Gerudo in the Great Bay. Both the clock master's daughter and the swamp witches' son sense that something is amiss. Slowly they come to understand one another while their world gradually winds itself apart. Mostly platonic Zelgan with elements of horror and themes of trauma and healing.
1. The Clock Master's Daughter

It seemed, for a time, that the moon would fall. The moon did not fall, but since then none of the clocks in town worked properly.

And this was strange, Zelda mused, because there was no reason for this to be the case. The river running under the central tower moved the gears that powered the device for which Clock Town was named, and the water certainly hadn't stopped flowing. Even if it had, that still wouldn't have explained why none of the other clocks in town could keep time.

Zelda dangled her feet over the wooden scaffolding surrounding the clock tower, leaning back against its stone wall as she looked south. The late afternoon light stained the pale bricks of the townhouses gold, and the cheerful blue banners that had been hung to welcome visitors fluttered in the breeze. Not a single tourist had come to the Carnival of Time this year, yet none of the decorations had been taken down. Was the Town Council still expecting people to arrive? Had anyone actually come last year? She couldn't remember.

Zelda wished she could ask her father, but he had passed away when she was a child. Of course, most people still considered her to be a child even now, and she suspected that a lot of the work she was given originated from a sense of charity. She was proud of her skill, and she resented being approached with a patronizing attitude. Who else could keep the finicky sound system in the Milk Bar operational? Who else could keep the ventilation fans in the Bomb Shop spinning? And who else could keep the mechanisms of the clock tower, the town's pride and joy, perfectly calibrated?

With proper maintenance, clocks did what they were supposed to do. Zelda liked that about them. She could take them apart and put them back together, and nothing would change. Meanwhile, time itself swept everything away. The mayor's wife, who had once been like an aunt to her, grew bitter and cantankerous once her son Kafei left the house. Her friend Cremia took longer and longer to answer her letters as she grew more serious about managing the ranch that her parents had left her. Their friend Anju, who had once sworn that she would never be interested in romance, had just gotten married to Kafei. Kafei's grandmother, who once baked delicious poffertjes for the three girls while they sunbathed on the balcony of the Stock Pot Inn, had been confined to a sitting room where she endlessly muttered to herself, all the while believing that she was speaking to her deceased son Tortus. Time changed everything, but clocks were reliable.

Or at least they used to be. Now every single clock in town kept a different time, and some had stopped working altogether. Zelda knew that they hadn't all been built by the same person. In fact, she had made a good dozen of them herself under the guidance of her father. It might be, Zelda hypothesized, that they all used the same part from the same faulty batch, which was why they had all gone weird at roughly the same time.

People could deal with their own clocks as they saw fit, but Zelda's main responsibility was to the clock tower. She felt a strong sense of duty toward the town. In a way, the clock master had more power than the mayor, for the schedules of people's daily lives were regulated by the rhythms of the time kept on the town's clocks. Every brick and roof tile and paving stone had its place in the town, and people needed to be able to find their places as well. Harmony was built on the foundation of well-regulated time, and Zelda saw it as her job to maintain this order. Everything in Clock Town had its proper place, as well as its proper time.

The rules governing this order could be broken in special circumstances, however. It was said that the door to the upper portion of the clock tower only opened at midnight during the Festival of Time, but this was not precisely true. The springs and pulleys and levers that held it closed for most of the year could be coaxed into submission, but they would need a great deal of lubrication.

Zelda purchased her machine oil from the two chemists who lived in the Southern Swamp, but deliveries had fallen off recently, and none of her orders had been filled since the unpleasant business with the moon. The swamp was only a few hours' walk south, and Zelda figured that she could use the exercise. Until the clock at the top of the tower was repaired, she had nothing to do, so she might as well set off to procure the oil herself.

She always enjoyed her conversations with the two Gerudo chemists, and perhaps they might be able to help her make sense of why all the clocks had failed. And who knows, they might even be old enough to remember where the original parts had come from. Zelda had heard stories about the technological witchery of the Gerudo women who lived on an artificial island in the bay. Now would be as good a time as any to ask for an introduction to one of their machinists. Zelda smiled to herself as she imagined riding into their city on one of their motorboats. She had always wanted to visit the Gerudo Fortress, and now she finally had an excuse.

It was a perfect plan. There was only one problem, and that problem had a name: Ganon.


	2. The Swamp Witches' Son

Ganon watched the shadows lengthen over the water as the float of his lure bobbed on the placid surface of the swamp. The rhythm of the whirring cicadas interrupted the soft sound of plants growing, and every so often a pair of dragonflies zipped through the air. Otherwise, everything was quiet.

Like his mothers, Ganon was dressed in loose dark clothing fringed with patterns that he had embroidered in gold thread. As he leaned back against a mossy raised root of a mangrove tree, he seemed to blend into its shade. He was not accustomed to long periods of inaction, but fishing helped him concentrate, and he had a lot on his mind.

Several weeks ago it seemed that the moon would fall. This strange meteorological event filled Ganon with an odd type of energy, almost as if the coming catastrophe were something he'd been anticipating. For a few days the creatures of the swamp had grown violent, and he himself was struck with restlessness. It was like the gravid stillness right before one of the hurricanes that tore through the swamp in the fall, sending arcs of electricity zagging across the water. He had gone out roaming deep into the swamp forest, driven by a compulsive desire to search for something that he would only recognize once he had found it.

But the moon did not fall, and Ganon did not find what he was seeking. When he returned, his mothers scolded him as they always did, but it seemed that nothing had happened in his absence. Since then, however, letters had ceased to arrive from the Gerudo in the western bay.

This didn't bother Ganon, for he wanted nothing to do with the women who clung to their rusting eyesore of an island like barnacles. He had spent the first few years his life on the floating iron fortress, and as far as he knew there had been no problems until his mother died at sea. When he was passed to one of his aunts, it had quickly become public knowledge that he was different from the other children. The revelation of his sex aroused malicious gossip and even panic, for Gerudo males were believed to bring calamity and misfortune. Ganon had been too young to form lasting memories of what happened to him, but he had vague recollections of being kept in a windowless room with little light and even less food. Two of the Gerudo elders, Kotake and Koume, had eventually taken him into their care and brought him with them to the Southern Swamp. It was better to be closer to the source of the ingredients they used for their potions, they explained to him when he was older; and besides, they added, they knew how magic worked, and they had no use for the superstitious nonsense of the ignorant.

Ganon had hated the swamp at first. The air was always oppressively humid, with none of the bright sun and brisk salty breezes of the sea. He missed the sparkle of light on the waves and the endless sound of the shifting tides, but in time he came to appreciate the shadows and stillness of the wetlands. He loved the violence of the fierce storms that swept through the trees in the spring and autumn, and he appreciated that, for the most part, he was left alone.

His two adoptive mothers often sent him out to fetch fresh plants and mushrooms, and he harbored no resistance against being ordered to embark on such errands. He had little patience for potion brewing, but he possessed a gift for magic. He challenged himself by fending off the aggressive snapping turtles that waddled through the depths of the forest, not to mention the giant octoroks that lurked in the shallow ponds at the base of the mangrove trees and the venomous golden orb weaver spiders that dangled from the rotting wooden beams of the ruins that rose from the black water.

Ganon often wondered about these abandoned buildings. Who had lived here, and where had they gone? As he grew older, he ventured deeper into the swamp. The monkeys who swung between the low-hanging branches by the Deku Palace chattered nothing but nonsense, but it was from them that he heard of a place called Woodfall, a basin of murky water sheltered within a hidden cove formed by a hollow in the Ikana cliffs to the northeast. Following the vaguest of directions, Ganon had poled a raft over long stretches of water choked with lotus leaves, making his slow and careful way through curtains of gray hanging moss. Eventually he arrived at a vast stone temple half-submerged in stagnant swamp water.

There was nothing there except for a wooden mask fringed with tattered and moldy feathers. It was propped against a tangle of vines on the floor of the vestibule, as if someone had taken it from its proper place and returned it in haste. The small room was clearly an entryway, but its walls and ceiling were solid, and Ganon could see no way of progressing farther into the structure. He briefly considered blasting his way through the walls, but he could feel the presence of something watching him, something ancient and malicious. His instincts screamed at him to leave the mud-stinking silence of this cursed place, and so he did.

But he was not willing to let the matter rest.

The Deku Scrubs told him that the temple was once a site of worship. Apparently, a great giant had been venerated there. When he asked them about where the giant had come from, and why it had been worshiped, and by whom, they simply shook their heads in a leafy rustle of apathy. One of them muttered something about a "skull kid," which stirred a vague memory in his mind that he couldn't quite catch ahold of. It was like when he forgot a word and could only taste the ghost of another language on his tongue, a language that he had never heard with his own ears.

Every so often his mothers sent him to Clock Town to make an emergency delivery when the Deku merchants had other business. He occasionally entertained thoughts of moving to the town and leaving the swamp behind him. There was something about the bright white stones of the outer wall that called to him, but he had no interest in the arbitrary inconveniences of an orderly urban life, and the townspeople annoyed him with their empty pleasantries. He remembered their names and faces because he had to, but he had no friends among them.

A frog started to chirp, and then another, and then a whole chorus of voices filled the swamp. The sun disappeared below the tops of the trees, and its dying light tinged the water a rich maroon. It looked as it did when the moon seemed to be falling and a rank miasma had filled the swamp. Ganon wondered what the connection between the two could have been, but no one he asked expressed any interest in the question. In fact, no one seemed the least bit concerned with was happening with the moon in the first place. Why had no one else been bothered by such things? Not even his mothers, who usually took note of even the smallest details, had betrayed any anxiety that the moon would fall.

Ganon had always felt out of place with his surroundings, but the strange business with the moon intensified his sense of being somehow out of alignment with the world around him.

He gave a few small tugs on his line, but no fish were biting. He should probably head home before it got dark. He knew, in a sullen and neglected corner of his heart, that the potion shop was not his home, but it made no difference. If he didn't belong here, where could he possibly go?


	3. A Dim and Fragrant Stillness

The humidity settled on Zelda's forehead like a wet towel as she used her oar to push away from the mossy wooden poles of the dock. Both the dock and her raft belonged to the euphemistically named "Swamp Tourist Center," the headquarters of a hunter and trapper who was active in the wetland shallows. Koume, one of the Gerudo chemists, occasionally set up a counter in the ramshackle building, but this afternoon she was nowhere to be found, and so Zelda had to resort to rowing her way to the potion shop.

The surface of the water was covered in lotus leaves, and it was an irritating hassle to steer her way through them. It annoyed her even more to think that she might have to see the chemists' son Ganon, whom she disliked immensely. He never smiled and always made distracted and perfunctory replies when she saw him in town, and he never seemed to notice her at all when she visited the potion shop. There was just something about him that rubbed her the wrong way, and she hoped he wouldn't be there when she arrived.

The swamp was an ongoing explosion of bright colors and sudden sounds. Zelda vastly preferred the comforting quiet of Clock Town, where there were no buzzing insects or sudden eruptions of birds taking flight from the water. Still, there was a certain sense of beauty in the chaotic disarray of the wilderness, and Zelda wasn't immune to the thrill of knowing that anything could be lurking just around the next overgrown pile of vegetation.

After half an hour or so of rowing, Zelda arrived at the potion shop, which was perched on a platform built halfway up a lone tree rising from the middle of a shallow pool of spring water. A ladder descended from the edge of the boards, its rungs uncomfortably far apart. Both of the Gerudo chemists flew on brooms, and the Deku merchants who handled deliveries used their leaves like propellers, so the ladder must be for Ganon's benefit. _At least he can't fly_ , Zelda thought as she climbed the ladder, grinning as she imagined Ganon awkwardly flitting through the air like an oversized bat.

When she got to the top, Zelda used the back of her hand to wipe the sweat off her forehead and paused to catch her breath. The walls of the building resting in the branches of the tree were made of tabby concrete, with shells of various sizes and hues poking out of the rough grain. Short but long windows circled the building at a level slightly above her head. Their glass panels had been propped open, and from their eaves hung curtains made of a thin but coarse fabric whose name she didn't know. The front door had been painted an outrageously bright shade of violet, and the subtle texture of the verdigris patina on its brass knob was warm on her palm as she pushed the door open.

The interior was cool and dark, and it smelled faintly of cedar and fennel. No one was behind the front counter. Zelda called out to make her presence known, but there was no answer. She would just have to wait, but she didn't mind. She was in no hurry, and the clean smell of the open room was refreshing.

She sat down on a low couch just inside the door and rested her back against its overstuffed cushions. The beams of hazy light streaming through the high windows fell on the metal knobs and brackets of the wall of cabinets behind the counter, and Zelda allowed her mind to drift as she imagined what sort of strange ingredients might be tucked away within the wooden drawers.

Bits and pieces of bright swamp glass were embedded in the interior walls in abstract patterns. The designs were haphazard and clumsy, and she had always suspected that they were created by Ganon.

 _Thank goodness he's not here_ , Zelda thought as she traced the patterns of softly glowing glass with her eyes. It was oddly mesmerizing.

There was a sudden noise, and Zelda was startled awake, realizing half a second later that she had almost drifted off to sleep. In the foyer of the potion shop, no less. She smoothed her hair down and straightened her back as she searched for the source of the sound.

"No dear, don't get up. You're fine."

The voice came from above her, and Zelda looked up to see Kotake, who floated to the ground alongside her broom. The old woman wore neat black robes held together by a white sash embroidered with a geometric progression of interlocking squares and rectangles, and her silver hair was tied back with a scarf bearing the same pattern. Zelda thought she was lovely, but she understood why the people in town sometimes referred to Kotake and her wife as witches.

Zelda had always felt comfortable around both of them, however, and she took Kotake at her word and remained seated. "I apologize for dropping in unannounced," she said. "Koume wasn't in the Tourist Center..."

"Of course she wasn't," Kotake muttered as she hung her broom up on a rack set into the wall. "That old hag is out in the woods hunting for mushrooms. Mushrooms! Can you imagine? And what with everything that's happening..."

Zelda perked up immediately. "About that," she said. "There's something weird going on in Clock Town, and I came here to see if I could do something about it. Are there strange things happening here in the swamp as well? I don't mean to pry, but – "

"I'm given to understand that the clocks have stopped," Kotake interrupted her. "That's the beginning of it, I think. I assume that you'll want to fix them, am I correct?"

"What? Well, I... Yes," Zelda stammered. "Do you know what's going on?"

Kotake shook her head. "You'll find out for yourself soon enough. But to fix the town's main clock you'll need to open the door to the tower, and to get the gears of the mechanism moving you'll need to coat them in oil."

"That's what I was thinking." Zelda was troubled by Kotake's comment about how she "would find out soon enough," but she decided to let it slide.

"Then go out back to the entrance of the forest and wait for that son of ours to meet you. He should be getting back any minute now. He knows where we keep the barrels of unrefined swamp oil, and he'll help you carry one back here so that we can set you up with the gear to transport what you need all the way back to Clock Town."

"Is there any way I could go find the barrels myself?" Zelda asked, unable to stop herself from grimacing.

Kotake grinned slyly at her discomfort. "Oh, that boy's a handful, that's for sure," she said, "but he's nothing you can't handle. I'm sure that idiot wife of mine has gone and gotten herself lost again, and I don't need two of you wandering around in the woods. Now get going! I'll send you back with some of the potion orders we haven't been able to deliver yet, and I need to find a basket for you to use. I'm sure it's around here somewhere, now where did I..."

"Okay," Zelda agreed, trying not to let her disappointment show on her face. "I'll go outside and wait for Ganon."

"Good girl." Kotake gave her a warm smile, which creased her face with deep lines. "And dear, just so you know, you don't need to call us 'chemists.' We _are_ witches, after all," she added before bursting out into a peal of cackles at Zelda's shocked expression.


	4. A Song Spun of Shadows

Ganon trudged through the woods with heavy steps. He hadn't been doing anything in particular, but he was still annoyed when Koume found him and told him to come home. The humidity was more oppressive than normal, as if a storm were brewing but never quite broke. Something was wrong, but he couldn't put his finger on what exactly made him feel this way. He had just returned from the Deku Palace in the northwest of the swamp, and it was almost deserted. There had been no traffic in or out of the fortress, and the scrubs who guarded the front gate were absent from their posts. It had been unnaturally quiet, and there was something off about the whole place. The lines of the architecture were less sharp, and the colors of the surrounding vegetation were less vibrant. It was as if an invisible fog had descended onto the water.

Ganon's feeling of wrongness dissipated as he returned to the potion shop. What could Kotake possibly need from him? He'd wanted to investigate further, and he didn't like being told what to do. Truth be told, he was probably getting too old to continue living with his mothers, and he'd been considering setting off on an extended journey for some time now.

When he was younger, Ganon had once ventured into Ikana Canyon. He read that ancient ruins guarding forbidden secrets lay resting there, and though his mothers tried to dissuade him he could not resist the allude. As he passed through the high hills separating the region from the broad plains of Termina he saw nothing except desiccated scrub brush emerging from brittle soil that cracked like dried clay, but there was something about the place that chilled him to his core.

The skeletons that walked and danced by moonlight did not bother him, nor did the ghosts that lit their meandering courses by pallid lantern light, for he had fashioned a mask of horn and bone to put them at ease. As he drew closer to the stone towers rising over the rim of the canyon, however, he began to notice hooded figures lurking at the fringes of his vision. Although he could not see them clearly he sensed the sharp edges of their blades. He was a child then, and he did not yet possess the courage to delve deeper into the wasteland, but perhaps now he might be ready to see what lay hidden within the blasted ruins of the old castle at the base of the towers for himself.

Ganon drew his machete to clear his way back onto the path. He disliked traditional Gerudo scimitars, which were ill-balanced for his body, and he preferred the straight blades used by the soldiers guarding Clock Town. But guarding it from what? _From people like me_ , he thought as he slashed through a tangle of vines. They fell like a thick curtain at his feet, and he stepped over them to make his way back onto the path.

As he emerged from the shade of the undergrowth he saw a young woman standing a few yards away. Her pale hair shone like the sunrise, and he recognized her immediately.

What was Zelda doing here? He had seen her around town, but she had always been vaguely unkind to him, as if his very existence upset her in some way. He wasn't taking any care to conceal his presence, but she didn't seem to notice him walking toward her. Surely she was purposefully ignoring him.

Nevertheless, his mothers must have sent her to meet him, and it would be pathetic to leave her here alone.

"Zelda!" he called out, the strange cadence of her name rising to his tongue like a spell he had learned as a child and not used in years.

She turned and looked at him, and in the split second before she smiled he could see her face twist in a grimace. What had he done to her? Why was she like this?

He saw no reason to be friendly. "What are you doing here?" he asked bluntly.

"Your mother, I mean, Kotake," she stammered, "told me to wait for you. I need to get some oil to use as lubrication for a device in the clock tower, and she said that you could show me where the barrels are kept."

Ganon didn't understand at first. He knew exactly what Kotake was referring to, but there was no reason why she didn't tell this girl to simply follow the path. After a moment it dawned on him that Kotake must have expected him to carry one of the barrels back to the potion shop. When he was younger he had volunteered to do all manner of tasks for no other reason than to show off his physical strength, and it had taken him almost a year to realize that his mothers found this amusing. It had since become a running joke that he would be sent to fetch something heavy that could easily be transported using magic. Kotake had more than likely renewed this silly game as a gentle reproach for the fact that he rarely spent much time in the shop anymore.

"Follow me," he grunted, making a gesture for her to do so. When he moved his hand he saw her eyes fall to his blade. He sheathed it and frowned, slightly offended by her distrust. "These woods aren't safe for someone like you," he said by way of explanation, making his annoyance clear.

"What were you going to fight with that sword? Quicksand?" Zelda snapped at him.

 _That would be a lot less trouble than dealing with you_ , he wanted to fire back, but when he turned to face her he saw that she was a step away from plunging into a peat bog covered in bright green algae.

He reached out for her just as she stumbled, and he just barely managed to catch her. Thankfully she had the good sense to grab onto his arm instead of trying to twist away from him.

"Yes," he said as she regained her balance. "I'm going to fight quicksand. With a sword. How observant of you to notice."

"Fair enough," she replied. Ganon realized that she respected him a little more for having been mean to her.

She released his arm, and he started walking down the path. She walked at his side, and neither of them said anything for a few minutes. The whirr of the cicadas rose and fell like waves.

"Why do you keep the oil so far away?" Zelda finally asked.

"It smells," he answered.

"But how can you tell? Everything smells out here."

"Your nose must have been dulled by city life," he responded.

"By the smell of clean laundry and fresh bread? Hardly."

"I meant by the stench of the open sewers you people call canals."

"At least it's better than living in the middle of a giant open sewer."

"That's funny, some people would say that trees and flowers are pleasant."

"Do you like it? I mean, do you like living all the way out here?"

Ganon resented Zelda's valuation of herself as living at the center of all things, but there was no malice or ill will in her voice.

"I do like it," he answered honestly.

"That surprises me. I thought the Gerudo preferred the ocean."

"We're not all the same," he replied, biting back the sour taste of the words he wanted to say but refrained from speaking aloud.

"You're right. I'm sorry."

Zelda sounded properly apologetic, but Ganon wasn't quite ready to let the matter slide. "I'm assuming you can imagine why I might be different from the women who live in the bay," he said.

"I guess I can," Zelda laughed. "It's pretty obvious."

"But it's not just the way I look," Ganon continued. "It's like you're different from the other people in Clock Town."

"What do you mean?" Zelda asked. Perhaps it was just his imagination, but there was something about her tone that suggested she might already have an idea of what he was talking about.

"This may sound unkind," Ganon ventured, "but it's like they're all mechanical dolls moving according to clockwork."

"That is _extremely_ unkind," Zelda responded, but she seemed more intrigued than upset.

"But you're different," he continued. "You notice things. As far as I can tell, you're the only one who noticed that the clocks stopped working."

"But they only stopped a few days ago," she objected.

Ganon was taken aback by this assertion, and he paused for a moment before responding. "No, it's been more than a few days. It's been like this since the moon started to fall, and that was weeks ago."

Zelda halted dead in her tracks and bowed her head, a disturbed look on her face. "I guess it was weeks ago, now that I think about it. That's odd," she muttered.

"It is," he agreed. "And did anyone else ever mention how the moon almost fell after it happened?"

"I guess not, but..." She shook her head and offered him a weak smile. "Let's talk about something else, okay?"

Ganon was disappointed by her request. For a moment he thought he'd found someone he could trust, but she was just like the rest of them, foolish and complacent. He no longer had any desire to have a conversation with her, so he set off walking with wide steps that he knew she'd have trouble keeping up with. As she trailed along behind him, he moved forward in silence. The sounds of the swamp, the steady trickle of water and the chirping of birds and the hum of cicadas, blended into the thick shadows of the forest surrounding them.


	5. The Center Cannot Hold

Three days later the clocks still didn't work. They no longer kept any sort of time, and in fact they had stopped moving altogether.

Many things had stopped moving, it seemed.

Zelda no longer saw the postman making his rounds through the city, and Goron traders had ceased to make deliveries to the shops. Zelda also had the feeling that there were fewer kids prowling the alleyways in the name of whatever secret society they had invented, although when she thought about it she couldn't be sure how many of these children there had ever actually been. She could have sworn that at least one of them used to guard the pathway to the Astral Observatory... but was that a real place? She had a vague memory of there being an astronomy tower at the castle, but what castle could that have been? Had she read about it in a story?

With no thanks to Ganon she was now painfully aware of the strangeness seeping up from the cracks that had begun to open in the routines of daily life in Clock Town. As he'd pointed out, there was something off about the smell of the water flowing through the canals, which ran clear but had a peculiar odor. Once she started paying attention, she realized that the milk served at Latté didn't quite smell like milk, and the poffertjes and bitterballen sold by the street vendors didn't quite smell like bread. Zelda couldn't remember the last time she ate, but she had worked without sleeping or eating before, and she decided that she could wait until everything stopped smelling so strange.

In any case, Zelda had made up her mind to return to the Southern Swamp. Ganon must know something. "It's like the town moves according to clockwork," he'd said, or something to that effect. What did he mean, exactly?

Zelda had never considered ritual and tradition to be bad; this was simply how people made sense of their lives. Even if your father died and your friends grew distant and the very moon seemed as if it would fall from the sky, there was a certain comfort in waking up in the morning and knowing the exact order of the small events that would be stacked on top of each other to form a day. Zelda knew better than anyone that the clocks would keep ticking regardless of human frailties. Only someone who had never lost anything and never known real fear would attempt to deny the blessing of stability.

It was easy enough for Ganon to say that the people in town moved like clockwork. He clearly possessed great strength. Zelda admired this, but she also resented how he acted like he never cared about other people and would be happy to watch the world burn. Self-reliance was a fine trait, Zelda thought, but there was something about Ganon that was distant to the point of callousness. Zelda suspected that many people probably saw her in exactly the same way, and it made her uncomfortable to be confronted with someone who embodied the same sense of sharpness that she had spent her entire life attempting to smooth out.

Zelda had rehearsed the pleasantries that she would exchange with the soldier guarding the south gate, but as she walked toward the wall across the cobblestones of the town plaza she realized that the woman was absent from her post. This was unsettling, but it made things easier for her, especially since every conversation with one of the guards felt like an interrogation. _Why do we even have guards?_ she thought. _No one visits Clock Town. Who have they ever protected? What good were any of them when the moon fell?_

She passed through the stone arch of the gate and into the open air of Termina Field. Beyond the town's walls were the traces of what must have been a magnificent garden in the past. As Zelda surveyed the ruins, she could almost imagine what it once would have looked like: lovely fountains and neat rows of hedges bordered by low stone walls. Even farther south was an amphitheater that was still used occasionally. After the most recent Festival of Time there had been a celebration there with a bonfire and fireworks. Zelda had danced with Cremia and Romani while Anju and Kafei watched them, appreciative but silent in their newlywed happiness. Even Kafei's mother was there, and Anju's grandmother, and the Zora band from the bay had played for hours, what were they called again...?

Zelda wanted to sit down on one of the overturned statues and allow herself to remember the evening, but she pressed on. She disliked Ganon, and their last encounter was extremely awkward, but she had to talk with someone. If she didn't, she was worried that she might just lose her mind, assuming that she hadn't started to go a bit crazy already. Although she knew it was irrational, she was afraid that whatever malady had befallen the clocks had started to affect her as well.

She'd spent two days working on the mechanisms controlling the passage leading to the interior of the central clock tower, trying one thing after another until the rusted hinges of the painted wooden door finally groaned open.

Zelda didn't know what to expect, but she wasn't surprised by what she saw. When she passed through the door, there was nothing there – only darkness that her torch couldn't penetrate, an absence of light that went on forever. Zelda knew instinctively that the tarry blackness would suffocate her if she allowed herself to be swallowed by it, and so she fled.

She hated to admit it, but Ganon was the only other person who suspected that something was wrong with Termina. If he couldn't help her, or if he pigheadedly refused to speak to her, she didn't know what she would do; she would be utterly lost in the steadily creeping chaos.


	6. Things Fall Apart

Ganon sat on the dock underneath the Swamp Tourist Center and watched as the twilight stained the water gold.

Something about the hue of the light on the surface of the water set off sparks in his mind that never quite kindled into a fire. He pursued the ghost of a memory, but so far it had led him nowhere. The cicadas, so loud just a few days ago, had fallen silent, but the chirping of frogs still rang out from the shadows pooling around the roots of the mangrove trees.

Ganon gazed steadily at a leafy shrub growing from the sandy base of one of the pillars supporting the cabin above him, and if he wasn't mistaken it was burdock. Burdock had no business growing in a swamp, but here it was, plain as day. His mothers bought bundles of the roots of the plant from the Deku merchants, which they ground up and infused into various potions. Ganon preferred burdock nettles brewed into tea, which was sweet and mild and earthy, like wind blowing over the grass of Termina Field. He thought of the herbs hung to dry in the rafters of the upper floor of the potion shop, astragalus and damiana and arnica and jewelweed and marshmallow, bundles of flowers and stems and leaves and roots that threw gorgeous shadows when the sun shone through them in the waning hours of the afternoon. He didn't imagine that he would ever return to that place, and for a moment his heart ached with nostalgia.

The trapper who made his headquarters at the Swamp Tourist Center wasn't there, and he probably never would be again. Ganon had just returned from the Great Bay, and he was tired and hungry. He broke the rusty lock on the cabin door and let himself inside. He found a bottle of springwater and stale bread behind the counter, and he didn't hesitate to take them for himself before climbing back down the ladder and sitting down on the dock in the shade of the building. He ate the bread while tossing small chunks to the fish swimming around the mossy edges of the wooden planks before prying the cork out of the bottle and drinking the water, savoring its taste. He hadn't spent much of his life on the sea, but he remembered being constantly thirsty. His trip to the bay had reminded him of how much he disliked the salt sting of the ocean in his eyes, and how he hated the glare of the sun. Thinking back on it now as he drank, another memory rose to his mind like the fish bobbing at the bread crumbs, but it was slippery and eluded his grasp. All he could remember was gold, like the gold of the setting sun on the still surface of the swamp water.

Ganon's thoughts were interrupted by a flicker of movement at the edge of his vision. He looked north toward the road leading to Clock Town, and he could just make out Zelda winding her way down the slope of the hill that dipped into the swamp basin. If he hadn't seen her he might never have heard her. Zelda moved more quietly than anyone he had ever met. It was almost as if she'd been trained, but who would have taught her something like that? And where would she have learned to walk in the manner she did, with her head held high and her shoulders thrown back?

The regal way she carried herself had always annoyed him, as did her attention to an endless procession of small details. How could she live her life like that, always tinkering with tiny gears but still acting like she was some kind of royalty? She seemed like she was interested in the world around her, but she wasn't, not really. How could she live in a wide world where magic existed and not care about anything beyond her small city? How nearsighted did she have to be?

But still he sat on the dock and waited for her. A part of him had known with absolute certainty that she would come back to the swamp, and he was almost relieved to see her. He watched her move carefully down the path as it petered out into loose gravel and marsh grass, and he absentmindedly wondered what she would look like in a formal gown. If she insisted on behaving like a princess, then she should dress like one. But no, he decided, her work clothes suited her better.

As she came closer, she eventually caught sight of him, and she raised a hand in greeting. Once she met his eyes she held his gaze. Ganon was impressed by her confidence. Although he didn't consider himself to be particularly frightening, he'd come to understand that people tended to find his presence off-putting, and he appreciated that Zelda had never shied away from him.

"Don't stand up for my sake," she said as she stepped over the holes in the rotting planks of the dock.

Ganon shrugged. "Don't sit down for mine."

Zelda looked down at him with an intense and unreadable expression. "You said that we were different from the people in Clock Town. What did you mean?" she asked.

So she had finally noticed it herself, then. Ganon felt oddly validated, but he was still annoyed that this woman thought that she could just walk up to him and start asking questions.

"You don't waste time, do you?" he muttered.

"I get the feeling we don't have much time left," she replied in a matter-of-fact tone. "What are you doing here? Are you waiting for someone?"

"No," he said as he shook his head. "It's just us. Us and the frogs."

"Do you mind if I join you?"

"No one's stopping you." He offered her the bottle of springwater as she sat down. She took it and drank deeply, tilting her head back as she did so. Ganon couldn't help noticing the grease on the skin of her neck as he watched her, and his eyes jumped to her fingernails, which were fringed with crescents of grime. He decided not to ask if she had managed to get the door of the clock tower open. Either she would tell him or she wouldn't.

"Did you know," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, "that there used to be a Goron who would lurk around the laundry pool wearing a bright green mask? He claimed it allowed him to talk to frogs. I always thought it was ludicrous, but I still wondered if maybe he wasn't telling the truth. Do you think it's possible? You know, to talk to frogs?"

She handed the bottle back to Ganon. "Of course it's possible," he replied. "That sort of thing isn't out of the ordinary for an enchanted mask."

Zelda answered him with a faint smile. "I guess you would know. So, about Clock Town."

"What about it?"

"It's gotten strange."

"It's always been strange."

"Don't be difficult, you know what I mean. You probably don't want to talk about the Gerudo in the bay, but I have to ask – have things gotten strange for them too? Do their clocks still work?"

"I wouldn't know." Ganon could feel the chill of Zelda's frown, but he hadn't meant to evade her question. He took a moment to gather his thoughts and then responded to her as honestly as he could, explaining that he had gone to Romani Ranch to hire a horse but found it deserted. He took a horse anyway, somehow managing to saddle it even though both he and the animal were thoroughly spooked by the eerie lights that hovered in the sky above the fields. He rode to the bay and ranged up and down the shore but saw no sign of either Zoras or Gerudo sailors. Even stranger was the fact that there were no boats on the quays. He considered fashioning a crude raft, but the ocean seemed threatening and uncanny, as if the air above it were also underwater. The sky was hazy, and there was something about the irregularity of the rhythm of the waves that made him uncomfortable. Instead of investigating farther, he rode back to the ranch, but there was nothing there when he arrived, only an expanse of thick gray mist. With no other options, he let the horse go and returned to the swamp on foot.

"You did all of this in the past three days?" Zelda asked him when he finished speaking.

"That's the thing you have trouble believing?" he remarked incredulously.

"I'm not sure what I believe," she responded. "It's not that I doubt what you're telling me, but there must be a rational explanation for what you saw."

A rational explanation? Surely she must be joking. "I've heard it said that Termina is held up by four giants, one in each direction," he replied with a smirk. "Maybe they've gotten tired and walked away."

Zelda ignored his attempt at levity. "What about your mothers? What do they have to say about all of this?"

"They were gone when I came back. There's no one here anyone."

Ganon watched Zelda's face grow pale. Hearing these words spoken aloud must have caused the reality of the situation to set in for her, and she didn't respond. They sat in silence and listened to the calls of the frogs echoing over the water.

"I'm afraid," Zelda finally said in a small voice. "I don't know what's happening, and I don't know what to do. What's wrong with Termina? How can we save it?"

Ganon was struck by a fresh stab of irritation. Had she really not figured it out yet? He exhaled and forced the muscles of his face to relax.

"Zelda, listen," he said in as gentle of a tone as he could muster. "There's nothing to save."

"What do you mean by that? Don't you care?"

"It's not a matter of caring or not caring. You must have noticed that Termina isn't real."

Zelda scowled at him, but he could see the anxiety written in the fine lines of her face. Without further comment she rose to her feet and walked back along the dock in the direction of Clock Town. He let her go.

He picked up the bottle finished the rest of the water. He tossed it between his palms, watching the fading light gleam on the glass surface as it moved, and then he chucked the bottle into the swamp. It landed with hardly any splash at all and floated for a few moments before beginning to sink. It was an awful thing to waste something as useful as a glass bottle, but it's not as if it mattered anymore. Ganon spat out a curse, frustrated that he had let Zelda storm off like that.

"This world isn't real, Zelda," he murmured as he stood and straightened his robes. "But we are, and you didn't ask the most important question. If Termina isn't real, what are we doing here? Who are we?"


	7. What Has Been Forgotten

Zelda didn't pay much attention to her surroundings as she climbed the hill through the pine forest clinging to the edge of the swamp. She was furious with Ganon. She didn't know what he had seen during the past few days, but she was disgusted by his casual dismissal of the strangeness of the situation. If something had happened to the Gerudo in the Great Bay, the least he could do was appear to be concerned. And how could he be so callous as to have seen that Romani Ranch was in trouble yet taken a horse without trying to help? Zelda was worried about Cremia and Romani, and she resolved to head to their house immediately to check up on them as soon as she got out of the woods.

Her frustration with Ganon had been so overwhelming that she'd stormed off without saying anything, but now that her temper had cooled she realized that she could have just ignored him and gone to the potion shop by herself. Of course, it would have been difficult to find her way there through the swamp at night, and she wished that Ganon could have at least attempted to be a little more civil and cooperative. She'd meant to pick up lamp oil at the trapper's cabin; and now, as the dusk began to deepen, she regretted that she had gotten so caught up in the heat of the moment that she'd forgotten to replenish her supply. The path in front of her was a thin line of pellucid twilight hewn between thick walls of darkness, and she hoped she'd be able to leave the shadows of the trees before the light completely faded.

She stopped for a moment to withdraw her lantern from her knapsack, and the quiet that descended in the absence of her footsteps was oppressive. Unlike the frog-infested swamp, the pine forest was silent, with no birds or insects or even wind stirring the branches of the trees. Zelda became uncomfortably conscious of each rustle of fabric and creak of leather she made as she shifted her bag and raised its front flap.

Suddenly she heard an odd high-pitched noise, and she paused to listen. It sounded like some sort of flute. A flute played poorly, but a flute nonetheless. Zelda moved toward the sound along the path, and before long she could see a faint glow up ahead. As she kept walking, she realized that the light was coming from a lamppost. But what was a lamppost doing out here in the pine scrubs? And, even more curiously, who was the small figure crouched at its base?

Zelda drew closer, and she could see that there was a girl sitting within the circle of the soft glow of the glass lamp suspended from the iron lamppost. The girl's knees were pulled to her face, and her arms were crossed over her bent legs. She wore a thin pink shift made of fine silk-lined cotton, and white satin gloves extended over her lower arms. There was something strange about her face, and once Zelda was standing almost right next to her she could see that the girl was wearing a porcelain mask with only the faintest facial features suggested by the slight curves on its otherwise flat surface. The mask was pushed up just a little so that the girl could blow into the blue flute that she held clumsily with both hands. The notes she produced were weak and out of tune, but the melody was strangely familiar to Zelda. The song made her feel slightly nostalgic, so she suppressed her unease and addressed the girl.

"Excuse me, miss?" she offered. "Are you lost?"

The girl dropped the flute from her lips, and her featureless mask fell back down, completely covering her face. She murmured something, and Zelda had to bend down and lean in to catch her words.

"Time flows like a river," the girl whispered. "Where will you be if you row upstream? Who will you meet there?"

"I beg your pardon," Zelda replied with a frown. The girl ignored her and pointed farther up the path. Zelda was more than a little spooked, but still she stood and followed the direction indicated by the girl's white satin glove. After she had had gone a few paces forward, the starkly defined shadows in front of her vanished, and she turned back to find that the light behind her had been extinguished so thoroughly that it was as if it had never existed in the first place. Zelda swallowed nervously, wishing that she had the foresight to ask Ganon to accompany her to Clock Town, but there was no going back now. She was on her own.

She kept following the path through the forest; and, a few minutes later, she could see another bright point of light at the edge of the line where the trees met the high grass of the field. The light emanated from another lamppost. Unlike the first lamp, which had been fashioned of plain cast iron, this one was gilded with bronze that had oxidized into a grey-green patina. As Zelda came closer, she could hear the soft notes of a harp, but she couldn't ascertain the source of the music until she was standing right beside the lamppost, at which point a young man emerged from one of the shadows cast by the light. He was wearing a loose cloak like the one favored by Ganon, but instead of pitch black it was a deep midnight blue. The man's face was wrapped in strips of cloth that seemed to have been cut from the same fabric as his cloak. The cloth covered everything except his eyes, which were an unsettling shade of murky burgundy. Even the thin fingers that played the harp he carried in his hands were wrapped in bandages.

Zelda was so surprised by his appearance that she was unable to greet him. He seemed to sense her discomfort, so he simply nodded before addressing her in a voice that was surprisingly gentle.

"That face you wear… Is it your real face? If you take off that face, who will you be underneath?"

Zelda felt a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, and a clammy chill passed over her skin. She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came to her tongue. As she struggled to find a response, the young man stepped back into the shadow cast by the lamp. Zelda stared into the darkness, wondering how he had managed to disappear so completely. She hoped he would return, and after a moment of waiting she caught herself touching her cheek with the pads of her fingers. What did he mean by her "real face"? She didn't understand, but she had a spidery sensation of the rough weave of bandages on her own skin.

She shook her head to clear her mind. She had always known that outcasts and other unsavory characters made their home in the swamp forest ( _like Ganon_ , a voice whispered at the back of her mind) but in a few minutes she would be clear of the trees. The light of the lamppost was already fading, so she started walking at a brisk pace. Soon she emerged into Termina Field. 

The sky was a bit clearer in the open field than it was under the trees, but it wouldn't be light for much longer. Zelda hadn't seen the moon since the crisis. Although its absence hadn't caused her any distress while she was still in Clock Town, she could have used its light out here in the wilderness. She turned to face the comforting glow of the lamppost behind her, but she could no longer see it. Perhaps it had been extinguished like the first one.

Zelda frowned. Why were there lampposts in the swamp forest anyway? Who were they meant to guide? Who was that child, and who was that young man? What were they doing all the way out here? She was too anxious about what was going on in Clock Town and at Romani Ranch to ponder these concerns too deeply, but for some reason she didn't feel as worried as she knew she should have been. Again she wished she hadn't walked away from Ganon without spending more time talking with him. She wished she had asked him to explain what he had seen at the Great Bay and why he had left the ranch so quickly. Had he encountered the lampposts too? And, if so, who had been waiting under them?

Zelda reconsidered her decision to head straight for the ranch. It was too dark outside, and a heavy sense of unease had settled on her heart like a cold wet blanket. She would go back to Clock Town, and she would allow herself to relax while she tinkered in her workshop. She could make up her mind concerning what to do next once she had the opportunity to calm down and think about everything rationally.

As Zelda followed the road north to Clock Town, she began to hear the beat of a soft metal clang, which gradually grew more rhythmic and resonant, almost like a steel timpani drum. She continued walking along the gentle upward slope, and before long she could see the light of another lamppost. Its appearance did not surprise her at all, nor did the figure standing beside it.

Unlike the girl in the pink dress or the young man in the indigo cloak, the person waiting for her here did not hide. Zelda suspected that she couldn't have hidden herself even if she had wanted to. For one thing, she was covered in a full suit of silver armor. Zelda was no stranger to metalworking, and she could tell from the joints and curves in the metal plates that the knight was a woman, probably at the height of her physical prowess in full and healthy middle age.

The most striking aspect of this woman's appearance, however, was her helmet, which must have been unimaginably heavy. It bore a protruding faceplate that was both delicate and bestial at the same time. Despite the feminine qualities of the twining arabesque design etched into its surface, a set of antlers rose boldly from the helmet, branching into a dizzying map of silver-tipped prongs. The effect was magnificent to behold, but Zelda shuddered to think of the weight that the lady knight must have been bearing on her neck and shoulders.

The woman tapped the point of her long and cruelly sharp rapier against the steel of one of her shinguards, making the melodious metallic sound Zelda had heard earlier. When she saw Zelda approach, she ceased her movement and sheathed her sword.

"I've been waiting for you," the knight said simply.

There was something strangely familiar about her voice. Zelda could almost identify what it was, but it slipped away from her, so she put it out of her mind. "Are you here to guide me?" she asked.

"Guide you?" The woman laughed, and once again Zelda was struck with a keen sense of uncanny familiarity. "Why would I need to guide you? You know exactly where you need to go. Every branch in the path eventually leads to the same terminus, after all."

Zelda grimaced. This woman was just as bad as Ganon in the way she refused to speak clearly and instead resorted to riddles. "I'm afraid I'm not wise enough to understand what you mean," she admitted. She attempted to keep her tone calm so as not to betray her frustration, but the knight replied to her in a voice as cold as the wind blowing down from Snowhead.

"What does it mean to be wise? Is it knowing how to distribute suffering to those better able to bear it? Who has the right to make that choice? Will you take all the suffering upon yourself?"

"What? I… I don't understand." Zelda took another step forward, but the knight had already turned away from her. Zelda wished she could have spoken with her for longer, and she felt sick to her stomach as she watched the older woman walk away from her. Night had finally fallen, and she quickly lost track of the silver gleam of the woman's armor after she passed out of the circle of light cast by the lamp.

Zelda bit her bottom lip as she removed her lantern from her satchel and poured in the last remaining bit of oil she had with her. She then withdrew a long-stemmed match, but her hands were trembling, and it took her several tries to light the wick. She doubted she had enough oil left to get back to Clock Town, but she knew the way, even in this grim and moonless night.

After an hour of walking, her lantern had almost gone out, but Zelda could see another lamp just up ahead.

This lamppost was made of old and crumbling stone riddled with fissures. Intricate carvings danced around the molding at its base and crown, but Zelda only glanced at them, for she was unable to draw her eyes away from the figure standing beneath the light, a radiantly beautiful young woman in a long and loose white gown. She was barefoot, and she wore a mask that made her head appear as if it were wrapped in a cocoon of feathers. Long hair flowed down her back and swayed slightly in a breeze that seemed to touch nothing else. She was humming to herself, or perhaps singing softly. There was something marvelous about this woman, but also something terrible, and everything about her – from her unnatural beauty to the merciless edges of the ivory pinions jutting out behind her ears – set Zelda's nerves on edge.

Zelda wanted to avoid her, to leave the path and pretend that she had never seen her, but her feet drew her inexorably forward until she was face-to-face with the woman in the bright feathered mask. Zelda noted with dismay that they were the same height, their ears the same shape, their hair the same shade of gold. The woman took reached for Zelda, and though it filled her with dread Zelda couldn't help herself – she took the woman's hand, which was as cool and smooth as marble. When the woman spoke, she spoke not in one voice, but in an impossible multilayered harmony.

"It's said that we're nothing more than our memories, but memories disappear like clouds on a sunny day, like seafoam on the waves… If you lose yourself, what has been lost?"

Zelda dropped the woman's doll-like hand and answered without hesitation. "I am myself, and no one but myself," she asserted. "Who else could I possibly be?"

The bird-woman didn't deign to reply, but suddenly Zelda knew the answer. She didn't know everything, but she knew enough.

She had to return to Clock Town immediately, and she hoped against hope that she wasn't too late to stop what must have been fated to happen. Without a backward glance at the winged horror under the ancient lamppost, Zelda dropped her lantern and began running. The flame of the lantern sputtered out when it hit the ground, but Zelda wouldn't have cared even if it had flared into an inferno. If she set fire to the dry summer grass, then the field would just have to burn behind her. Zelda wasn't running for her life, but for something far more important than her life could ever be.


	8. The End of a World

Some things are better left forgotten, but it had never been in Ganon's nature to let the past remain still and at peace.

Ganon sat on the wooden platform in front of the clock tower while he waited for Zelda. He knew she would come to him eventually. As he sat looking out over the southern square of Clock Town, elliptical flashes of memories followed each other through his mind, snapping at their own tails in a twisting ouroboros.

There was a tan sandstone castle in the desert, and a white marble castle on the plain, and there was fire, fire everywhere. The flames that rose in his memories disturbed him, but he embraced them – fire was the only thing that could light the darkness, the endless formless chaotic darkness of the gaps in his memory. He had a vague recollection that he had forsaken the sun-drenched castle of his people for the shadowed castle under the cloud-choked gray sky, and he was haunted by fragmented recollections of how he learned that this castle was built on a foundation of its own poisonous darkness. He had attempted to rule it as a king, but he was nothing more than a king of bones, a king of stinking mud and broken masonry. Every fiber in his being attempted to pull him away from these memories of shame and despair, but he desperately wanted to remember who he must have been. It almost tore his mind apart to be two people at once, the swamp witches' son and a king of darkness, but he would have to endure the cognitive dissonance until Zelda arrived. She was the key to all of this, somehow. He was drawn to her, drawn to her beyond all reason, and he had to know why. If he saw her again, perhaps he would remember.

After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, Zelda finally crossed through the portcullis of the southern gate. He watched her wind her way through the crooked streets, once again noticing how silently and gracefully she moved. Yes, now he remembered – it was her Sheikah training. How foolish he had been not to see her for who she was when she had disguised herself as a Sheikah moving like a shadow through his kingdom. He had not expected a woman who had not been raised by the Gerudo to possess the sorts of abilities she commanded; but, then again, the princess had always been special. As he had remarked to Zelda earlier, she saw things that other people didn't. She had seen him, and she had sensed his power, and she had known him for what he was, even right from the moment they first locked eyes, a tiny slip of a girl and the armored diplomat of a disgraced tribe. He had resented bowing to this child, and she had not been fooled by his facile pleasantries and his too-easy smile.

It hurt his head to see her both as a girl and as a young woman his own age; or, at the very least, not much older than he had been when he first came to her kingdom as a teenager. How old was he now? How much had he aged? He wondered how he could be two people at once, a boy who had gathered and dressed herbs for his mothers while slowly and meticulously laying a fresco of swamp glass into the walls of their treetop dwelling and a king who was hated and feared throughout a land similar to yet completely different from this one. How could that be possible?

But then, he wondered, how many people was she? A princess, a protector of her people, an administrator blessed with a skill he would never possess, a spy, the leader of the resistance against him, and even something of a witch herself. And yet she was still the same bright-faced girl who fixed clocks and fiddled with machinery and pretended not to grieve when her father passed away and made no secret of the fact that she admired his own mothers. In the end, Zelda was the only person who was willing to see him as an equal among all the people in this world or the other.

Ganon smiled bitterly to himself. No wonder there had always been so much friction between them. Even had they not been enemies, they were simply too much alike.

Zelda finally arrived at the base of the clock tower. She clenched her fists at her sides and glared up at him. The shadows cast by the scaffolding darkened the subtleties hidden in the angle of her eyebrows and the twist of her lips, but the steely glint of determination in her eyes shone like the point of a sword.

"Ganondorf," she said, her clear voice echoing like the peal of a bell across the empty stone plaza. "I have come to stop you."

He knew then the sting of the golden arrows she had let fly at him without mercy, and he knew he should hate her for all the misery she and her wretched family had caused his people in the years stretching back from those crystalline moments of pain, but it still gave him pleasure that she remembered his true name.

Ganondorf grinned down at her. "Come on up, Your Highness," he said, smirking as his lips twisted around her proper title. "The night isn't getting any younger."

He glanced up at the heavens, where the moon was suspended directly above his head. It had not been in the sky since it first appeared that it would fall, but here it was once again above the clock tower. The hands of the clock had disappeared from its wooden face, which was as blank and ineffable as the moon itself. Ganondorf instinctively understood that had he had seen this before – the moon would fall, and soon, but this time it wasn't because of the mischief of a broken child or the negligence of any half-forgotten elder gods. The moon would fall simply because it was time for this dream to end.

Ganondorf looked down at Zelda's upturned face. She betrayed no expression of fear, only a cold calculation of how much time they had left. Or perhaps she was merely evaluating whether he was luring her into some sort of trap. But surely she must know that he had no power over her here, and perhaps she did indeed understand this, for she climbed the stairs to join him on the platform.

He didn't stand to meet her. Instead, as he had on the dock in the swamp, he offered her a bottle.

"This is a top-shelf sample of the special Romani Reserve," he told her. "I took it from Latté, but I don't suppose anyone will miss it at this point."

"No, I don't suppose anyone will," Zelda responded as she took it and sat beside him. "There's no one else here now, is there? Was there ever anyone else here?"

Ganondorf didn't answer. Zelda sniffed the uncorked mouth of the bottle, gave a slight smile, and drank. She continued drinking for some time, and Ganondorf couldn't blame her. Even in this phantom world on the verge of collapse, there were still some things worth savoring.

Zelda exhaled and wiped her mouth with a bit of the ornamental cloth hanging at her waist, no longer using the back of her hand like a mechanic.

"The first time it fell, the moon had a face, you know," she remarked. "I always thought it looked familiar, not to mention more than a little unattractive. Now I remember – it was your face."

"For a princess, you're extraordinarily rude."

"Did you do this?" she asked, ignoring his jibe. "Did you make this world?"

"If only I possessed that sort of power," Ganondorf answered, grimacing. "But it wasn't my magic that did this. It was your little boyfriend. He did it with that flute you gave him."

"How do you know that?"

It was a fair question, yet Ganondorf resented her for asking. He had spent years researching what the Ocarina of Time was and how it worked, yet the princess had held it in her own hands in almost total ignorance. Still, he decided that he would gain nothing by refusing to answer her.

"The ocarina was created from a block of pure timeshift stone that originated in the mines under the desert," he began. "I searched for it in the Gerudo ruins before realizing that it was in your castle all along. You Hylians tend to burn your books every time there's a regime change, so you had no knowledge of how dangerous that instrument is, only that it opens the door to the Sacred Realm. It does open the door, but only at great cost: by splitting and fragmenting time. That's what creates a place like Termina."

"Think of it, Zelda," he continued. "There are a multitude of timelines, an entire cosmos of worlds, all ultimately doomed to nonexistence because an ignorant boy used a powerful tool indiscriminately. He doesn't have the blood of Hylia in his veins, so all the worlds he created are little more than facsimiles, but what you did when you used the Ocarina of Time yourself…"

"Just listen to you pontificate," Zelda snarled at him. "I would never have needed to do any of this if it hadn't been for you. You killed my father, and who knows how many other people besides."

Ganondorf laughed ruefully before taking the bottle from Zelda. He drank before answering.

"You foolish girl, you're just as bad as the boy. You may have been trained as a Sheikah, but you have no understanding of how magic works. The royal family of Hyrule is cursed. The dead that walked the streets of Castle Town, the monsters that made their lairs in the temples that you Hylians abandoned – do you think I did that? Do you think those creatures suddenly sprang into existence because of me? They'd been there all along, because it was your own queens who created them. And if it hadn't been me who sought the Triforce, it would have been someone else. Maybe it would have even been the boy himself, orphaned and abandoned in one of your father's wars."

Zelda met his eyes, a terrible understanding beginning to dawn on her face. "What are you suggesting?"

"It was the magic of the ocarina that created this realm, but it wouldn't have been possible without the Triforce, and the shape of this world reflected the shape of your hero's heart. The moon has fallen before; it has fallen many times. This cycle of the moon falling and falling and falling… I wonder how many times that boy used the flute to reset the past so that he could save just one more person, and then just one more? It's pathetic."

"There is _nothing_ wrong with Link," Zelda snapped. "And don't try to shift the blame away from yourself. It's your face the moon bears, after all."

"I'm not interested in explaining myself to you." Ganondorf shrugged. "And the moon has no face," he continued, pointing a finger toward it for emphasis. "The boy just saw it that way when he was here, but that was nothing more than one manifestation of the monsters he must have carried with him. Who knows what other horrors he confronted here in the world of his own making before he could find peace? And when he could finally move on, he did."

"So you're suggesting that Termina – _this entire world_ – is Link's nightmare?"

"Exactly so."

"And he drew us into it without meaning to, that poor child…"

"Save your sympathy," Ganondorf sneered. "He woke up, and we've been stuck here ever since. Now we have to figure out a way to wake up as well. If we don't, we'll disappear along with everyone else in this dying world."

Zelda shook her head. "You know I can't let you to wake up," she said sadly. "Even if it means I have to sacrifice myself, I can never allow you to threaten Hyrule again."

"That choice is not yours to make," Ganondorf replied. "We're both at the mercy of the gods, and not even you can release me from the Sacred Realm."

Zelda sat for a moment in silent contemplation. "The Sacred Realm… what's it like?" she finally asked.

Ganondorf was not certain how best to answer her, for he could barely describe it to himself. Instead, he deflected her question. "You wanted to touch the Triforce too, didn't you?"

"I did." Zelda nodded. "How could I not? But I didn't trust myself."

"Would a world shattered by the touch of Wisdom be better than the one tainted by an excess of Power, I wonder."

"It's a blessing to all of us that you'll never find out." Zelda took the bottle from him again and drained the remainder of its contents. "But I still worry," she said softly, almost whispering, "what will happen now that the Triforce is no longer whole? Will we fall to ruin? Will Hyrule stagnate, now that we no longer have Power to energize our growth?"

Ganondorf had his suspicions that her musings were correct, and for a fraction of a second he felt a sharp sliver of guilt penetrate what little conscience he still allowed himself to maintain.

"The Sacred Realm is still and quiet," he murmured. "I barely know myself there, and it is a soft place, and peaceful. Yet it rejects me, and I cannot stay there. I don't know how many eons it will take, but I will find a way out; I must find a way out."

"The Triforce must be made whole again," Zelda said simply.

"And it will be," Ganondorf agreed. "I can feel it pulling me back even now."

"I can too…"

With those words she got to her feet, and he stood alongside her.

Zelda looked out over the Clock Town plaza, where the contours of every cobblestone stood out in sharp contrast in the overbright light of the feverish moon. "I'm scared," she admitted. "This was such a lovely dream, while it lasted. I had friends, and people who were just as close as family, and I could be my own person. I suppose I always felt a bit out of place, but I rather enjoyed being a clockmaker…"

It seemed to Ganondorf as though she were holding back tears. Perhaps it was because of the influence of the years he'd spent living in this dream, if in fact it had been years instead of nothing more than a tiny bubble in the flow of time, but he reached out to her and took her gently in his arms. Her body stiffened and then relaxed as she allowed him to hold her.

"Were you always the Demon King?" she asked him, so softly that he almost couldn't hear her voice. "Is that who you always were? Just as I always had to be the princess?"

Ganondorf shook his head without answering. He could not erase the past, nor the damage he had done. He could not purify the fury in his heart, or his regrets, or even the ferocity of his determination to reshape Hyrule once more should he ever be given the chance – but in the eerie glow of the falling moon he could offer a pallid semblance of comfort to this woman, even if it was only in this one moment.

Her arms slowly crossed around his waist, and he could feel the slight trembling of her body as she cried. Something deep inside him resonated with her pain, but he had no tears left to shed. That ability had been stolen from him long ago, when soldiers with silver helmets bearing the royal eagle crest came to the desert with spears and fire.

He tensed at the memory, and she released him, glancing up at the moon as she stepped away. It was closer, ever closer, closer with each passing minute. It was inexorable, the end of a world, the end of a dream in which she was nothing more than a clock master's daughter and he was nothing more than the swamp witches' son.

"Do you think we'll remember each other, the next time we meet?" she asked in a voice still thick with tears, not looking at him.

He took her hand in both of his and held it tightly. He knew the horror lying beneath the surface of her question just as well as she did, and he hated the answer with every ounce of his being.

"It doesn't matter," he replied, meeting her eyes. "No matter how the dawn comes, we'll greet it together, one way or another."

The moon had begun to take on a sinister red cast, and suddenly the sky was filled with stars, all falling upwards, leaving behind streaks of light as they extinguished themselves in the blackness of an empty void. The moon fell, as it would always fall, as it was doomed to fall because of the hero who was fated to rise, cast alongside two opposing forces sharing the same endless fate.

The wooden platform underneath their feet began to shine with an unearthly radiance, and Ganondorf knew it was time. The world they would wake into was far more terrible than this nightmare could ever be, but they had no choice. There was no longer anything to say, nor any time to say it. Even in this eldritch light Zelda cast her own brightness, but there was no longer a mask on her face, simply her naked self, vulnerable and filled with regret. Ganondorf held Zelda's hand in his, fixed her face in his memory, and then closed his eyes.

THE END


End file.
